Julie Phillips Brown

​Hinged-Pictures: the Material Poetics of Punctuation

Success in Circuit

Tell all the truth but tell it slant - Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth’s superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind -

— Emily Dickinson, F1263 [i]

The Poem is a fire-hunt, the Poet an animal charmed in one spot, eyes fixed to the light. My precursor attracts me to my future […] Connections between unconnected things are the unreal reality of Poetry. — Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson[ii]

As one of Dickinson’s most renowned and frequently cited poems, F1263 is generally understood as a meditation on the hazards of poetic truth-telling: immediate truth in a poem arrives like lightning before astonished children, and leaves its readers blind—unless the poet takes care to “tell it slant.” In an apt turn of Dickinsonian logic, the speaker offers this famous maxim, with its wink-and-nudge syntactic inversion: “Success in Circuit lies” (see Figure 1 for manuscript detail of these lines). “Success” depends upon an oblique, even circuitous movement of the mind and the line, presumably because the reader’s deferred understanding leaves “Truth” to unfold and “dazzle gradually” (or “moderately,” as the reader prefers). The “Circuit” may also figure, as others have suggested, as a strategy of distinctly feminine poetic truth-telling[iii]. Perhaps a female poet in nineteenth-century America could not do otherwise than to “tell it slant,” if her histories were to be heard and preserved. It hardly seems coincidence that even Dickinson, who was to become the most celebrated female poet of her age, should have recommended a circuit over a direct line, and during her lifetime, limited the publication of her poems to letters circulated among familiars.[iv]

In Webster’s 1844 American Dictionary of the English Language, the secondary definition of “Success” directs the reader toward “succession,” and thereby, notions of “lineage” and the “power or right of coming to the inheritance of ancestors.”[vi] Read in this light, the poem weighs the question of inheritance outside of the usual models of direct biological descent, proposing instead a succession by means of slant connections and circuitry. What successors might Dickinson, who neither married nor bore her own children, and who carefully preserved, but never published her poems, have awaited? The poem seems to imagine its own necessary, future audiences, and to claim connection, however counter-intuitively, through distance in both time and understanding. Dickinson shows uncanny prescience, too, anticipating not only the many “explanations kind” yet to be made on behalf of her poems—and indeed, many have felt their truths like lightning—but also the turbulent history of their transmission into contemporary readers’ hands.

In her essay, “These Flames and Generosities of the Heart,” Susan Howe laments the extent to which Dickinson’s original manuscripts were transformed by various early editors, asserting that both Dickinson as “subject-creator and her art in its potential gesture were domesticated and occluded by an assumptive privileged Imperative.”[vii] Even minor textual changes can make for significantly different meanings. In the case of F1263A, for example, Dickinson materializes her exhortation of the “slant” through the oblique tilt of her dashes and cross strokes (Figure 2):

And yet, the orientation of the poet’s mark-making is largely effaced from standard typeset editions of her work;[ix] indeed, the earliest published version of the poem, edited by Millicent Todd Bingham in Bolts of Melody (1945), omits Dickinson’s dashes entirely, to disastrous effect: “slant –” becomes “slant,” and “blind –” becomes “blind.” [x] These omissions are significant because they obliterate the “Circuit” that Dickinson drew (in her own hand, no less) between the first and second dashes in the original manuscript; Todd Bingham’s comma and final period supplant these vital dashes, rendering a sense of closure instead of an open, circuitous motion. The dashes are restored in subsequent editions, including Thomas H. Johnson’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1951) and Ralph W. Franklin’s variorum edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998). Johnson, as Howe acknowledges, inherited an already disheveled archive, which he then sought to right, determining an order for the poems and the fascicles and instituting a set of standardized typographic principles.[xi] But Howe also suspects Johnson’s editorial disclaimers,[xii] as well as the precedent his methods set for later editors, like Franklin. Perhaps suggesting a kind of male, editorial kinship, Howe cites this passage from Franklin’s introduction to The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson in full: “No attempt has been made to indicate the amount of space between words, or between words and punctuation, or to indicate, for example, the length of a dash, its angle, spatial relation to adjoining words, or distance from the line of inscription […] Stray marks have been ignored.”[xiii] In Howe’s telling, the “assumptive privileged Imperative” of Dickinson’s male editors misses its mark, and their disregard for feminine irregularity is self-evident.[xiv]

In their editorial biases, Johnson and Franklin also reflect the prevailing notion that punctuation is only ever immaterial and subservient to semantic and syntactic concerns. It is a strange irony indeed that without the first flawed efforts of these early editors, Dickinson’s poems almost certainly would not have survived in their present plenitude, nor achieved their widespread influence and appreciation among contemporary audiences. Such survivals in the literary historical record are, as we know, all too uncertain for women writers. And yet for Dickinson, precarity gives rise to poetic invention. In My Emily Dickinson, Howe imagines the vast constellation of Dickinson’s synthetic poetics, and the audacious “new grammar” that comes, paradoxically, from the very fractured, marginalized, and “sheltered” position she inhabited:

She built a new poetic form from her fractured sense of being eternally on intellectual borders, where confident masculine voices buzzed an alluring and inaccessible discourse, backward through history into aboriginal anagogy. Pulling pieces of geometry, geology, alchemy, philosophy, politics, biography, biology, mythology, and philology from alien territory, a “sheltered” woman audaciously invented a new grammar grounded in humility and hesitation. HESITATE from the Latin, meaning to stick. Stammer. To hold back in doubt, have difficulty speaking.[xv]

By virtue of her sex, Howe contends, Dickinson remains “eternally on intellectual borders,” and therefore writes with the unmastered freedom and casual interdisciplinarity of the auto-didact. The strength of her innovation lies in her embrace of her own liminality, humility, and self-doubt; if she hesitates and stammers, then it is because she must “tell it slant.”

Book artist and scholar Johanna Drucker has called for renewed attention to textual materiality in general, and to punctuation in particular, which “creates a fundamentally diagrammatic work” by “scoring” the material surface of the text. And yet, diagrammatic forms like punctuation marks “are so endemic to our processing of written and visual information, so pervasive in their presence and function,” Drucker notes, “that we rarely pause to consider their operational, functional, instrumental, and rhetorical force. Or, to imagine their poetical dimensions.”[xvi] The idiosyncrasies of Dickinson’s punctuation, and in particular, her dashes, have not been invisible so much as ignored, or worse still, “corrected” (indeed, Franklin once chastised Howe in a letter for wondering whether Dickinson’s notebooks might be “artistic structures”).[xvii] Howe offers, in turn, a corrective of her own: “Dashes drew liberty of interruption inside the structure of each poem,” Howe writes, “Hush of hesitation for breath and for breathing.”[xviii]Thus through the stammer, the circuit, and that slant of all slants, the dash, Dickinson breaks open a space for the female poet to survive.

What is lost in those earlier, presumptive editorial processes is the blinding truth of an originary female poet—Dickinson herself, or at the very least, a slant telling of Dickinson, refracted through her poems’ irregular “stray marks.” For Howe and other women writers, this loss threatens nothing less than utter exclusion from the sacred ministrations of language:

Identity and memory are crucial for anyone writing poetry. For women the field is still dauntingly empty. How do I, choosing messages from the code of others in order to participate in the universal theme of Language, pull SHE from all the myriad symbols and sightings of HE.[xix]

Howe’s account of the aspiring female poet’s quandary is more statement than question, a plaintive and sober assessment of the relative paucity of models for feminine poetic making. That Dickinson is one of only a few scarce poetic ancestors makes the violations of her editors all the more lamentable. Only with the publication of Franklin’s facsimile edition in 1981, The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, did Howe and others begin to fully fathom the import of the original manuscripts (as well as the extent of the editorial interventions of Johnson and Franklin). The question of access—to the manuscripts, and their exploded constellations of word, image, punctuation, and material surface—became of paramount importance. The decades since Franklin’s facsimile edition have seen something of a sea change in Dickinson scholarship; in particular, women poets and scholars like Howe (in such works as My Emily Dickinson, The Midnight, and Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives, to name only a few volumes), Sharon Cameron (Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson’s Fascicles), Marta Werner (The Gorgeous Nothings and The Envelope Poems, both co-edited with Jen Bervin), and Jen Bervin (The Dickinson Composites, discussed later in this essay) have helped to renew attention to the materiality of Dickinson’s manuscripts.

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Let us take Drucker’s provocation at face value, then, and consider the “poetical dimensions” of the dash. The 1844 Webster definition for “dash” encompasses not only the “mark or line in writing or printing, noting a break or stop in the sentence” and “a pause; or the division of the sentence,” but also “Collision,” “Infusion,” “Admixture,” “A rushing,” “A sudden stroke,” and “A flourish.”[xx] Thus the dash is a paradoxical mark that both divides (“break or stop”) and joins (“Collision” and “Admixture”). The dash moves forward in a line with speed (“A rushing”), but it also lingers (“a pause”). I argue that the multivalent, paradoxical nature of the dash is crucial for understanding not only Dickinson’s theorization of “Success in Circuit,” but also the various ways in which contemporary poets like Susan Howe and Jen Bervin have entered that circuit and claimed their inheritance. For both Howe and Bervin, the dash is an emblem rich with permission. The dash is a slant (dis)continuity, an (im)material mark of connection through non-connection. Within its logic Howe finds a model for her “spiritual hyphen,” the very pinion of her spectral, textual telepathies.

“Superstition remains—as spiritual hyphen”

Counterforce bring me wild hope non-connection is itself distinct connection numerous surviving fair trees wrought with a needle the merest decorative suggestion in what appears to be sheer white muslin a tree fair hunted Daphne Thinking is willing you are wild to the weave not to material itself

—Susan Howe, The Midnight[xxi]

Figure 3. Susan Howe, Bed Hangings (Granary, 2001)[xxii]

In The Midnight (2003), Susan Howe’s collaged, text-and-image elegy for her mother, Mary Manning,[xxiii] the poet asserts that “non-connection is itself distinct / connection.” Howe’s claim seems to respond, however obliquely, to the open proposition of Dickinson’s “Success in Circuit” in F1263. As Howe’s “precursor,” Dickinson attracts her to her future, but how to achieve connection with a deceased beloved, except through non-connection? Thus, the poem is concerned with whatever traces survive: “fair trees wrought with a needle” in a ghost-like, white-on-white embroidery. The fair tree is none other than “hunted Daphne,” locked in the form of the tree and the weave of the muslin for all time. If Howe proposes a slant model of relation, one that finds connection in states of adjacency and difference, she also ponders the problem of a “hunted,” entrapped feminine figure: how to free her, or at least, to enter the ecstatic wilderness of intertextual weavings and interleavings to meet with her?

Later in The Midnight, the poet recounts her ill-fated attempt to view the original manuscripts of Dickinson’s “My Life had stood — a / Loaded Gun —” and “Essential Oils — are wrung — / The attar from the Rose.” Whereas Johnson enjoyed full privileges of access to the manuscripts, Howe’s foray into the archives is a comedy of errors met with every possible resistance, hesitation, and self-doubt. After twice failing to negotiate the door to the Reading Room at the Houghton, Howe enters:

I tell them I have come to see Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts H50-52 and H131-32 […] and tell them I have the Curator’s permission […] The material I requested isn’t there. They whisper among themselves, glance at me now and then, and politely but firmly say they don’t have it. They ask to see the Curator’s letter. I don’t have it.

I had driven up that day from Connecticut and booked into the Howard Johnson Motel, my pencils are sharpened, notepaper ready. I have waited weeks for this moment […] I am feeling a sense of humiliation and angry despair.”[xxiv]

Howe’s humiliation and despair underscore her sense of illegitimacy; as a professor without a college degree, Howe considers herself, like Dickinson, perpetually at the margins of intellectual institutions and discourses—and, most painfully, of this particular archive.

Access to the archive is imperative for Howe because it preserves the possibilities of touch[xxv]: proximity, contact, and reciprocation with the material traces of Dickinson’s own person. As Howe explains in Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives, the archive itself is a repository of material oddities, whereby “we may capture the portrait of history in so-called insignificant visual and verbal textualities and textiles.”[xxvi] Stray marks. Howe expresses a sense of fatedness about such archival materials, suggesting that they lie in wait and present themselves at the opportune moment: “Often by chance […] a particular ‘deep’ text, or a simple object (bobbin, sampler, scrap of lace) reveals itself here at the surface of the visible, by mystic documentary telepathy. Quickly—precariously—coming as it does from an opposite direction. If you are lucky, you may experience a moment before.”[xxvii] Archival materials, by dint of some unknown intelligence, anticipate their revival in the hands of future audiences:

One historical-existential trace has been hunted, captured, guarded, and preserved in aversion to waste by an avid collector, then shut carefully away, outside an economy of use, inaccessible to touch. Now it is re-animated, re-collected (recollected) through an encounter with the mind of a curious reader, a researcher, an antiquarian, a bibliomaniac, a sub sub librarian, a poet.[xxviii]

The very presence or touch of the poet seems enough to ignite the “historical-existential trace” back into life. Thus Howe views the archival object as a liminal medium—a hinge between present and past, the living and the dead.[xxix]

In the front matter of The Midnight, Howe renders another kind of hinge-picture, a double portrait (a reference to the “counterfeit presentment” in Hamlet, oft portrayed in production as a locket) (dis)connected across the physical space of a single sheet of paper:

There was a time when bookbinders placed The counterfeit presentment of two papers. a tissue interleaf between frontispiece and title page papers. After 1914, advancements in printing in order to prevent illustration and text from technology rendered an interleaf obsolete. rubbing together. Although a sign is understood Mischief delights in playing with surfaces. Todayto be consubstantial with the thing or being it each spectral scrap intact in a handed down book represents, word and picture are essentially rivals. has acquired an enchanted aura quite apart fromThe transitional space between image and scripture its original utilitarian function. Wonderfully life-is often a zone of contention. Here we must like, approaching transparency, not shining; thisseparate. Even printers and binders drift apart. pale or wanly yellow, tangible intangibleTissue paper for wrapping or folding can also be murderously gentle exile, mutely begs to beused for tracing. Mist-like transience. Listen, excused. Superstition remains—as spiritualquick rustling. If a piece of sentence left unfinished hyphen. Listen, quick rustling. In secondcan act as witness to a question proposed by a suspected character, freed from practical obligation, I’mending, the other side is what will happen. Stage not asleep just leafing. Miniature scenery.snow. Pantomime. Etiquette.

“Give me a sheet," one calls, to which the other assents On your side, with pleasure.”[xxx]

Through the interleaf, Howe materializes Dickinson’s dash as a “spiritual hyphen.” Here again is Howe’s “wild hope” for slant connection: as both a physical division in the book and a “zone of contention,” the interleaf is a liminal space of possibility, a hinge between the present and the histories that persist through trace matter and archival artifacts. This connection through non-connection happens through the reader’s turning of the book’s pages: “Listen, quick rustling,” Howe tells us, as the two sides of the double-portrait rustle and echo one another.[xxxiii] Indeed, one half of the portrait anticipates the other, initiating a dialogic circuit across the division of the page: “Give me a sheet,” one calls, to which the other assents, “On your side with pleasure.” It is in disjunction, or “a piece of a sentence left unfinished,” that connection is to be found—where one can anticipate and call forth “the other side.”

In My Emily Dickinson, Howe cites Dickinson’s prose fragments as “a hint as to Emily Dickinson’s working process”: “‘Did you ever read one of her Poems backward, because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have — A something overtakes the Mind—’.”[xxxiv] Howe’s own ambivalent sense of time is embedded in the very logic of the dash, displayed here in Dickinson’s tumbling cascade of oblique phrases. “This reordering of the forward process of reading,” Howe writes, “is what makes her poetry and the prose of her letters the most original writing of her century.”[xxxv] It is also precisely this willingness—to move backwards as well as forwards—that Howe inherits from Dickinson. For all the (im)possibility of the poet’s elegiac endeavors in the archives, this piercing superstition remains: “Of course I can’t really bring back a particular time. That’s true. Or it’s true if you think of time as moving in a particular direction—forward you say. But what if then is now. I hope my work here and elsewhere demonstrates something about the mystery of time.[xxxvi]

(im)material embroideries

As a poet and textile artist, Jen Bervin has created a body of work deeply resonant with Dickinson’s material poetics. In recent years, Bervin has edited two collections of Dickinson’s late fragments, The Gorgeous Nothings and The Envelope Poems (both with Marta Werner). But Bervin’s affinities with Dickinson are nowhere more apparent than in her series of large-scale embroideries, The Dickinson Composites. Each of Bervin’s six 6’ x 8’ quilts transcribes, in red silk embroidery on pure white cotton batting, the composite marks from a single Dickinson fascicle (the series includes fascicles 16, 19, 28, 34, and 40). With The Dickinson Composites, Bervin offers yet another feminine alternative to the “assumptive privileged Imperative” of Dickinson’s earlier editors. By omitting the normalized text of the poems, and by making both visible and tangible all the irregular markings and alternative wordings that had for so long been ignored or repressed, Bervin seeks a relation with Dickinson through touch, material, and paralinguistic idiosyncrasies. The question of order—a problem once conceived in linear and chronological terms by Dickinson’s earlier editors—collapses into a spatial constellation of Dickinson’s stray marks. As Bervin insists upon and reinscribes Dickinson’s idiosyncratic materialities, she emphasizes the poems’ status, in the tradition of Howe and others, as aesthetic compositions and exploded circuits of possibility.

Though still domestic in their materials, Bervin’s quilts are by no means domesticated. Rather, the materials are sumptuous, the contrast of crimson silk on the soft, scored cotton batting inviting hand as well as eye. The Composites retain the proportions of the original fascicles, rendering Dickinson’s mark-making on a grand, but still human scale. The embroideries are at once monumental, perhaps like a Frankenthaler color field painting, and intensely detailed, textual, and intimate. When installed, the quilts nearly cover the interior walls of the gallery, a kind of inner sanctum and circuit of Dickinson’s embroidered marks.

What is perhaps most arresting about The Dickinson Composites is the way that they embody Dickinson’s circuitous dash and Howe’s “spiritual hyphen” writ large. Bervin’s palimpsestic, fleshly quilts leave behind the familiar, standardized language of the poems, and they collapse and seal shut with each stitch the interiority of the fascicles—but they also suffuse the pale fiber of the batting with arterial threads of punctuation. Thus the embroideries exist at the limit between connection and non-connection, simultaneously closing and opening access to Dickinson’s manuscripts. What is represented—what remains—of the fascicles is perhaps what Bervin would consider most essential: Dickinson’s dashes, crosses, scored lines, and alternative word choices. The embroideries initiate their own call and response, calling us back to all the slant irregularities of Dickinson that were domesticated and occluded.

Visitors to the gallery would have encountered The Dickinson Composites on a scale very near their own. In such close proximity, it would be difficult not to notice the intricacy of Bervin’s embroidery, and to recognize the sheer investment of time and effort necessary to deliver Dickinson’s “stray marks” into the present moment. The embroideries exemplify what the poet and critic Susan Stewart has called “face-to-face” forms of engagement in her essay, “On the Art of the Future.” “Face-to-face forms,” Stewart explains, “have a capacity to change or move us, perhaps because of their propinquity and because of the incipient tactility such close conditions imply.”[xxxvii] Thus visitors would have found themselves in reciprocal relation with the embroideries, and through them, the fascicles and Dickinson as they have never been experienced before—not only through vision, but through touch and proprioception.

Here is the archive, they seem to say, awaiting the caress—the dash, as trace—is a matter of faith. Or as Howe has it, “To reach is to touch.”[xxxviii]

[i] Emily Dickinson, “F1263” in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R.W. Franklin (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005). 494.[ii] Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson. (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1995). 97.[iii] Dolores Dyer Lucas writes, for example, “in a generation which did not permit her without the ambiguity of the riddle, to ‘tell the truth’… she early learned that 'success in circuit lies.’” For more Emily Dickinson and Riddle. (Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 1969). 138.[iv] Cristanne Miller notes that Dickinson circulated approximately one-quarter of her poems to her friends, mostly in her late letters, and postulates that her reluctance to publish may reflect the poet’s desire for privacy while she lived. For more on this subject, see Miller’s “Introduction” in Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them. (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2016). 2.[v] Emily Dickinson, detail of Amherst Manuscript #372 (F1263A). Emily Dickinson Archive, 18 Jan. 2018, www.edickinson.org/.[vi] Noah Webster, An American dictionary of the English language. (Amherst, Mass: J.S. and C. Adams, 1844). http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:FHCL.HOUGH:9768950. 713.[vii] Susan Howe, “These Flames and Generosities of the Heart: Emily Dickinson and the Illogic of Sumptuary Values” in The Birth-mark. (New York: New Directions, 1993). 131.[viii] Emily Dickinson, Amherst Manuscript #372 (F1263A). Emily Dickinson Archive, 18 Jan. 2018, www.edickinson.org/.[ix] Emily Dickinson, Bolts of Melody, ed. Mabel Loomis Todd. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1945). 233.[x] Howe writes, “The original order of the packets was broken by her friends and first editors so that even R.W. Franklin—the one scholar […] allowed unlimited access to the originals at Harvard University’s Houghton Library—can be absolutely sure only of a particular series order for poems on a single folded sheet of stationery.” “These Flames and Generosities of the Heart: Emily Dickinson and the Illogic of Sumptuary Values” in The Birth-mark. (New York: New Directions, 1993). 143.[xi] Ibid., 131, 135.[xii] Howe ponders this problem with / as Dickinson thus: “What is the communal vision of poetry if you are curved, odd, indefinite, irregular, feminine. I go in disguise. Soul under distress, thread of connection broken, fusion of love and knowledge broken, visionary energy lost.” See My Emily Dickinson. (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1995). 97.[xiii] Ibid., 21.[xiv] Johanna Drucker, “Diagrammatic Writing & the Poetics of Relations” Archiving Cultures. Institute for Contemporary and Modern Culture, 2010. http://archivingcultures.org/mot/451.[xv] For her part, Howe expresses incredulity at what she considers Franklin’s failure of imagination: “I wonder at Ralph Franklin’s conclusion that these facsimiles are not to be considered as artistic structures. How can this meticulous editor, whose acute attention to his subject matter has yet to be deciphered in the neutralized reading even her fervent admirers give her, now repress the physical immediacy he has brought to light?” See “These Flames and Generosities of the Heart: Emily Dickinson and the Illogic of Sumptuary Values” in The Birth-mark. (New York: New Directions, 1993). 146.[xvi] Ibid., 23.[xvii] Ibid., 17-8.[xviii] Noah Webster, An American dictionary of the English language. (Amherst, Mass: J.S. and C. Adams, 1844). http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:FHCL.HOUGH:9768950. 444.[xix] Susan Howe, The Midnight. (New York: New Directions, 2003). 17.[xx] The most comprehensive discussion to date of materiality and elegy in The Midnight is to be found in Susan Barbour’s "‘Spiritual hyphen’: Bibliography and Elegy in Susan Howe's The Midnight". Textual Practice. 25 (1): 133-155. Other such treatments include Marjorie Perloff’s “‘The Rattle of Statistical Traffic’: Citation and Found Text in Susan Howe's The Midnight." Boundary 2. 36 (3): 205-228, and Gerald L. Bruns’s "Voices of Construction: on Susan Howe's Poetry and Poetics (a Citational Ghost Story)." Contemporary Literature. 50 (1): 28-53.[xxi] Susan Howe, The Midnight. (New York: New Directions, 2003). 125-6.[xxvii] As Howe explains, “The nature of archive research is in flux; we need to see and touch objects and documents; now we often merely view the same material on a computer screen—digitally, virtually, etc.” Susan Howe, Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives. (New York: New Directions, 2014). 9.[xxiii] Howe continues, “In material details. In twill fabrics, bead-work pieces, pricked patterns, four-ringed knots, tiny spangles, sharp-toothed stencil wheels; in quotations, thought-fragments, rhymes, syllables, anagrams, graphemes, endangered phonemes, in soils and cross-outs.” Ibid., 21.[xxiv] Ibid., 18.[xxv] Ibid., 24.[xxvi] For an extensive study of such liminal, “third spaces” in Howe’s early works, see Elizabeth W. Joyce, “The Small Space of a Pause”: Susan Howe’s Poetry and the Spaces Between. (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2010).[xxvii] Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson. (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1995). 23.[xxviii] Susan Howe, “Encloser” in The Politics of Poetic Form. (New York: Roof, 2008). 194.[xxix] Susan Stewart, “On the Art of the Future” in The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 18.[xxx] Susan Howe, Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives. (New York: New Directions, 2014). 60.[xxxi] Susan Howe, Kidnapped. (Ireland: Coracle, 2002). i-ii. I include these reproductions from Howe’s Kidnapped as further examples of the poet’s attention to the possibilities of materiality and touch; in this fine, small press edition (which predates The Midnight), the flyleaf appears as a tangible, loose leaf tissue paper, rather than as a facsimile reproduction, as in The Midnight.[xxxii] Ibid., iii-iv.[xxxiii] Howe’s later phrase, “Quickly—precariously,” in Spontaneous Particulars seems an uncanny echo of her language here.[xxxiv] Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson. (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1995). 23.[xxxv] Ibid., 51.[xxxvi] Susan Howe, “Encloser” in The Politics of Poetic Form. (New York: Roof, 2008). 194.[xxxvii] Susan Stewart, “On the Art of the Future” in The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 18.[xxxviii] Susan Howe, Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives. (New York: New Directions, 2014). 60.